Argobba language
Ethiopian Semitic spoken in an area north-east of Addis Ababa by the Argobba people
Argobba is an Ethiopian Semitic language spoken in several districts of Afar, Amhara, and Oromia regions of Ethiopia by the Argobba people. It belongs to the South Ethiopic languages subgroup, and is closely related to Amharic.
Writing in the mid-1960s, Edward Ullendorff noted that it "is disappearing rapidly in favour of Amharic, and only a few hundred elderly people are still able to speak it." Today, many Argobba in the Harari Region are shifting to the Oromo language. Those in the Ankober district speak the Amharic language.
Phonology
Consonants
Depending on the Argobba variation, the number of consonants varies. In the Shonke and T‘ollaha variation there are 26 consonant phonemes, in the other variations there are 25. The additional consonants are the pharyngeal fricatives /ħ/ and /ʕ/ as well as the velar fricative /x/.
Argobba consists of 11 plosive consonant phonemes. All of them (except the voiceless postalveolar plosive can be placed in the initial, middle and final position of the word.
Vowels
There are six vowel phonemes in Argobba and they are not differentiated in vowel length.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q29292. The Library of Congress control number is sh85007106. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Argobba language” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.